It is a curious fact, not without some later analogies, that the introduction into the New World of this "direful spring of woes unnumbered" was promoted, in the first instance, by the good Las Casas, as the hopeful preventive of a worse evil. Touched by the spectacle of whole tribes and nations of the Indians perishing under the cruel servitude imposed upon them by the Spanish, it seemed to him a less wrong to transfer the infliction of this injustice to shoulders more able to bear it. But "man's inhumanity to man" needed no pretext of philanthropy. From the landing of the Dutch ship at Jamestown in 1619, with her small invoice of fourteen negroes, the dismal trade went on increasing, in spite of humane protest and attempted prohibition. The legislature of Massachusetts, which was the representative of the church, set forth what it conceived to be the biblical ethics on the subject. Recognizing that "lawful captives taken in just wars" may be held in bondage, it declared among its earliest public acts, in 1641, that, with this exception, no involuntary bond-slavery, villeinage, or captivity should ever be in the colony; and in 1646 it took measures for returning to Africa negroes who had been kidnapped by a slaver. It is not strange that reflection on the golden rule should soon raise doubts whether the precedents of the Book of Joshua had equal authority with the law of Christ. In 1675 John Eliot, from the midst of his work among the Indians, warned the governor against the sale of Indians taken in war, on the ground that "the selling of souls is dangerous merchandise," and "with a bleeding and burning passion" remonstrated against "the abject condition of the enslaved Africans." In 1700 that typical Puritan, Judge Samuel Sewall, published his pamphlet on "The Selling of Joseph," claiming for the negroes the rights of brethren, and predicting that there would be "no progress in gospeling" until slavery should be abolished. Those were serious days of antislavery agitation, when Cotton Mather, in his "Essays to Do Good," spoke of the injustice of slavery in terms such that his little book had to be expurgated by the American Tract Society to accommodate it to the degenerate conscience of a later day, and when the town of Boston in 1701 took measures "to put a period to negroes being slaves." Such endeavors after universal justice and freedom, on the part of the Christians of New England, thwarted by the insatiable greed of British traders and politicians, were not to cease until, with the first enlargement of independence, they should bring forth judgment to victory.